This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Firefox 4&5 Choppy Video Playback

  • 2 replies
  • 93 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by flashchop

Son23
Son23
more options

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron running Window's Vista Home Premium.

Ever since I upgraded to firefox 4 (and now 5) videos that require flash player have been choppy and unwatchable. If I go on youtube, blip.tv, gametrailers, or even Justin.tv, I can hardly watch any videos. It's completely unwatchable! The audio streams just fine and the video loads fast, but even when it is completely loaded the videos are choppy. Just recently I wanted to watch a video from thatguywiththeglasses.com (who uses blip.tv for their videos), and I couldn't! It was like pausing a movie every other second while the audio still played. So I decided to go to gametrailers to watch another video and it happened there too. After that, I went to youtube to try to watch a video and it wasn't as bad, but it was still pretty bad. Now I have been all over the internet, all over firefox forums, and apparently people have been having similar problems and it sounds like a flash plugin problem with some new feature added to firefox 4 and up. I tried all the solutions offered in each forum with no luck. When I play a video and check my CPU, a plugin called "plugin-container.exe" takes up 94% of my CPU! I think this may be the problem. So after that long rant, I ask you...what can I do to fix this problem (aside from downgrading)?

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron running Window's Vista Home Premium. Ever since I upgraded to firefox 4 (and now 5) videos that require flash player have been choppy and unwatchable. If I go on youtube, blip.tv, gametrailers, or even Justin.tv, I can hardly watch any videos. It's completely unwatchable! The audio streams just fine and the video loads fast, but even when it is completely loaded the videos are choppy. Just recently I wanted to watch a video from thatguywiththeglasses.com (who uses blip.tv for their videos), and I couldn't! It was like pausing a movie every other second while the audio still played. So I decided to go to gametrailers to watch another video and it happened there too. After that, I went to youtube to try to watch a video and it wasn't ''as'' bad, but it was still pretty bad. Now I have been all over the internet, all over firefox forums, and apparently people have been having similar problems and it sounds like a flash plugin problem with some new feature added to firefox 4 and up. I tried all the solutions offered in each forum with no luck. When I play a video and check my CPU, a plugin called "plugin-container.exe" takes up 94% of my CPU! I think this may be the problem. So after that long rant, I ask you...what can I do to fix this problem (aside from downgrading)?

Modified by Son23

All Replies (2)

Matt48
Matt48
more options

I used the latest release of Firefox 3. for the longest time, long after 4 was out. I upgraded on my windows laptop, and only video stopped working. It is actually like it says here, choppy, but in a special way. I will echo what was said here, the audio is fine.

The video is however not. It plays fast forward, skipping frames, then goes back and replays frames in between, and then goes back and plays more frames in between. When one is watching motion, one sees the same activity forward several times before the playback generally advances to the next scene, and even jumping back and forth between scenes. It seems it is playing all of the frames, just out of order or something. That was my Windows PC. It is now upgraded to Firefox 5.0. I have no resolution to my video problems. CNN videos for instance are terrible.

I made the error of clicking upgrade on my Slackware Linux box, which was running the latest 3. something and upgraded directly to 5.0. Slackware 12 lacked the libraries Firefox needed, but, Firefox installed anyway, and would not open at all. With no way to reverse the upgrade, or downgrade, the computer was toast. I started the box over in Debian Linux. Now Firefox 5.0 works, but it will not play videos at all. I wish I had stayed with the latest release of Firefox 3.

In summary, as a user, I have seen no advantage in upgrading over Firefox 3 -- nothing I need in 4 or 5, but that would be OK, if 4 and/or 5 had not broken video playback.

flashchop
flashchop
more options

Fixed it (kind of).

<edit> I just realized you aren't running Linux. Give what I did below a whirl anyway. It may be related. </edit>

I had the same issue with Firefox 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, and at the time of writing 7.x. I was using version 3.6 and then that one stopped working too. I rolled back to 3.5 and then it worked again. Each installation is in its own directory.

It did not matter what version of Flash, and I'm currently using 10.3r181. Nothing wrong with CPU spikes or memory spikes or buffer settings or permissions. I'm running Mandriva 2010 and KDE 4.3.

For plugins, I'm using Flashblock and Adblock.

I tried all kinds of troubleshooting, including removing and disabling different plugins. I removed everything from ~.mozilla thinking there was a problem in there. I sudo'd over to root and ran Firefox from there to force the recreation of the temp files. I removed everything from ~/tmp. None of this worked.

I logged out, created a new user account, and logged in with that account....and voila, it worked. I put Adblock and Flashblock back in, and all is good This tells me it's something to do with the X session and some of its temp files that is misbehaving, but I have given up looking; there are lots of temp folders in ~ and /tmp relating to X, and I wouldn't even know where to start.

I moved my profile over and now I login with my new user, and all is good.

Modified by flashchop